Oh,Tomatoes and Other Garden Delights

Late lamented nectarine tree. Hope we get a volunteer or two from the seeds the squirrels bury. 
We miss the beautiful clouds of pink flowers and fragrant fruit, juicy ambrosia.

How very red, round and lovely. We love tomatoes for their flavor.

Some look like hearts (the organ) some brownish or purplish (Black Krim).

In the back garden on P St, since some of the nectarine orchard died back, sunlight has flooded into our sunken garden, making an ideal place for growing tomatoes. My mother and aunt start tomato seedlings in March.  Such a tender miracle to see the seedlings hatch out of their wee husks. We optimistically plant out the little things mid-May. Bury most of the stem to encourage strong roots. The transplants never look like much in the soil. So very tiny. Each set off with a ring of crushed white egg shells. We hope that they make gains between rainstorms and marauding bunnies.  If the current year is like the year before, soon the fill form a near impenetrable jungle. 

As they grow, we tie off the vines to long stick with bits of rag cloth.  My mother has a bundle of cloth strips labeled "best ribbons."  She washes them after each season, dries them in the sun and saves them for next time. She also washes the poles for disease prevention purposes.

My mother's chief garden joy is wall-to-wall tomatoes. I like a variety and can not say no to flowers and elements of intrigue.  Over the years, I added wild ginger and tiger lilies from a friend's mother, ferns and phlox from my mom, beloved hostas from many sources, a hydrangea from husband's work, lady statue that was a prop in a clothing store, trumpet vines that took 7 years to settle in and no time to run rampant. A curly willow branch from a dumpster-dived wedding arrangement is a 2-story tree.

My grounds keeping tends to embrace the jungle aspect. Joyous trumpet vine with a side of phlox in long narrow side garden.

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Gardening Out of Bounds

When my brother and I bought our house on Pppppppp St, I planted up the parkway with masses of flowers.  The house was built in the early 1900s.  I was attending a university with a gloriously, rich collection of old books. I researched what flowers were used at the time, love-in-a-mist, love-lies-bleeding, petunias, columbine, morning glory, and tarda tulips--low to the ground, opening their faces towards the sun. I raised them from seed.  A cousin complimented it as a real Polish garden.

Having secured the permission of the Sisters in a neighboring convent, I moved many orange ditch lilies to ring their grounds. One quiet Sunday, a woman asked how she and her child could get in to play.  They had walked all around the perimeter bounded by a 6-foot chain link fence and could not find an entrance. I told her it was private. She remained skeptical.  It must have seemed unlikely that a wide grassy field ringed with towering Great Northern Catalpa trees must be enjoyed from the inside as well.  And on other days of the week it was. Black, glossy crows congregated there. Cawing until wee children arrived for weekday daycare.

One day my pots of morning glories were toppled over on the other side of the tall chain link fence.  Torn, wilted tendrils clung to our railing.  One of the Sisters told me someone had it out for me. Someone did.  I suspected an ex-boyfriend who doggedly stalked me.

Some years later, tarda tulips seeded themselves on the other side of the fence and beamed where they were planted.

The Sisters sold their convent and land to a developer.  Where did the crows go after the field was filled with large houses crammed together? Remnants of the day lilies lined the alley.  Would they bloom again after a new neighbor squired herbicide around the edges where weeds sprouted? Terracotta angels were taken down from the roof line of the church replaced by fiberglass ones that never seemed to dirty or acquire a patina.  Why did no one ask me what to keep the same as it ever was?

For a glimpse in the how it was Steven Seagal's Above the Law captures our old neighborhood.

Action movies are not my cup of tea here, but...

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A Garden Story

Growing up we never used the term "backyard," we always said "garden." Our childhood garden was on  Wwww Street in the St Mmmm's of the @@@@@'s parish.  It consisted of a brick patio that housed  a swing and a picnic table set on white marble slabs. The other half was soil that occasionally yielded glass marbles and tiddly winks--mementos left behind previous children from previous times. One time my mother found 2 rings.  About 10 years ago, my mother met a man by the viaduct about a 1/2 block north of her house. He grew up in her house. He sent a photo from the 1930s of himself on a high wheeled tricycle, boxes or fruit and vegetables in front of the building. My mother's front room used to be a storefront deli.   Bubblegum machine, cola clock, icebox, marble counters were moved to the basement.  My mother used the smoker into the 1980s.

The former resident came to visit the following summer with a friend wearing a Leica camera who took pictures in the garden.   The steps to the alley and basement were as steep and uneven as he remembered.  He took away a souvenir purple brick. He said the 3-story fire escape came off a factory building that was demolished and that it was rumored that Al Capone's car was buried under the garage.

When my parents moved in, they planted a sole plum tree--flowers--no fruit and 2 prolific sour cherry trees.  A highlight of the summer was the great feeling of relief that school was over and retreating into the garden. Wondering as the tall, scratchy hollyhocks and the weirdly patterned bugs crawling on the hard, green buds.  My mom has photos of her, her friends, and baby me picnicking, relaxing.

When my brothers reached a rambunctious, climbing  age, my mother had the tree cut down to avoid falls.  My father had died suddenly and she was trying to avoid further grief. The soil baked dry.  The only things that grew were plantain and creeping Charlie, sweet violets in the moist spot by the bricks and a pink fairy rose bush that miraculously flowered every year.

In the 1980s, the city hopefully planted grass sod in everyone's parkway. Young tenants moved in, removed the grass and planted flowers. My mother resented the action at first, but it awakened her love of gardening. She added in pink phlox, Susan-black-eyes, astible.  She replanted the fairy rosebush in front and reclaimed the garden in back for tomatoes and beans.

One year scarlet runner beans gamboled up to the attic window via the fire escape.  This year I tilled up her soil--no more marbles or tiddly winks. ###

Cozumel paintbox

One of my favorite hues of one of my favorite colors.  Haven't found this blue as a paint color yet. 

I thought that Benjamin Moore's Blue Lapiz would be it, but it's looking smurfy to me beaming happily off our furniture.  I want deeper, bluer.  In general I'd like to gray down the colors on our walls OR make everything blue and dark.  I get frustrated thinking I found a suitable dullish color and it turns out to be overly bright or pastel/Easter eggish. 

A highly satisfactory choice was the Benjamin Moore Historical color 114, a perfect blue, gray, green that turned our small kitchen into a soft, lovely jewel box.

Perfect magenta.  Used on baseboards and kitchen trim in former apartment.

Yummy with a dark teal.

The sharp scarlet contrasts beautifully with the olive green bark.

Had to look everytime.

Big hair, baby.

Enormous leaves in understory in center courtyard.

Philodendron? rising 3 stories.  Love seeing plants max out.

Leaves lit bright green by the sun.

Can't remember the movie title, Farrah Fawcett's character lived in an all blue interior, at least the living room was.  I found it memorable, even if the blues seemed overly sharp and glaring. 

 Does anyone remember the title? 

The other movie that I got stuck on for its blue and brown interiors was

the Incubus with John Cassavettes (horror movie from the 1970s). 

bale of straw!

wow! so we were getting a ride from a nice person in her large family van, when I spied with my little eye a lovely bale of hay sticking up out of a trash can next to a park, I had her pull over, I ran  walked back quickly and with dermination lifted the golden parcel up and out, I was very happy in spite of the plastic cords cutting into the pads of my fingers, I had read that straw was a good mulch for the garden, very hard to find in the city, not to mention hard to transport without wheels, will save in a dry place for next summer,  will be nice to save on the chore of watering our little patch in the comunity garden